From the horse’s mouth

Technicolor (Thomson)

My Comments

Most people who want to benefit from Canal+ in France were required to subscribe to this service via the telecommunications provider who would make it available via their existing décodeur equipment. This also depended on whether Canal+ had a direct partnership with their provider.

Now Canal+ is heading down the “over-the-top” route where they are able to provision their service via the Internet independently of whoever was the customer’s telecommunications provider.

This is based on a Technicolor-built DVB-T set-top box called the “Cube S” which can connect to the Internet via your Ethernet or Wi-Fi home network. It is primarily a small cube-shaped device that connects to your TV via a vacant HDMI or video input.

One of the advantages pitched by Canal+ is that the device is portable amongst locations and amongst carriers so you can keep your TV subscription even if someone offers a better broadband package than what you are on. This is more so with a highly-competitive Internet-service market that is taking place in France where each provider races each other to provide the multi-play Internet service with the best value.

Canal+ could improve on this concept by offering the Cube S as a local PVR to record TV shows from free-to-air or their pay-TV service or work on “software-only” endpoints that are based around regular-computer, mobile or smart-TV platforms so that customers aren’t dependent on extra hardware to receive this service.

It is being seen as another way for a pay-TV provider to move away from an infrastructure-based model where a lot of money is tied up in their own infrastructure towards a model that is independent of that infrastructure. This also allows them to be sure that customers that aren’t in their infrastructure’s footprint can subscribe to the pay-TV service by virtue of their Internet provider.